We've had a retrobrite thread you might want to read. Mixed opinions.
Re: Shine On You Crazy Diamond

I replaced the dead battery in my Phantasy Star cart with a holder - a bit ghetto maybe but it's neat enough and any leakage is away from the PCB. My photos never do this Sony CRT justice, and the graphics in this game really show what the Master System can do:

I started to restore and upgrade my Mitac LP6613 😀

Pentium 2 350MHz
192MB SDRAM PC100
ATI Rage Pro LT? it is by ATi, actually a mobile chip and has 1996 speed 😁
2x PCMCIA
onboard LAN
onboard Crystal SoundFusion
Infrared
Onboard Speakers (the volume buttons do not work - maybe I need a driver?)
Onboard LCD 15"

Maybe it is possible (since it is a regular Slot 1 440BX) to upgrade it to the following:

Celeron (Tualatin) 1.2GHz
512MB SDRAM
Dual LAN (PCMCIA and onboard)

It could be a good retro LAN server 😀

Just obtained big lot of old socket3 boards, isa multi i/o controlers and isa graphics and some sound boards. So first quest will be to clean them from dust and dead battery leakage, then triyng to power them up. some of them has soldered on cpu AMD 386SX and DX, really small form factor. Hope some of them would be in good shape.
This month i ve recieved big lot of old pre 528MB and pre 2,1GB limit drives, so every free time i tested one after another. It was around 50/50 good and bad ones. Interesting data on some of them.
Iam sure there was topic about, but if someone direct me i will be glad to find info about cleaning that green rust from leaked battery.

Still floppy only for now;

Completed Duke Nukem I Ep. 1 again with a nice sepia tone. Fiddled around with my 486DLC as it refused to load Windows. Swore at my K5 for corrupting the floppy disk I was putting Duke on - seems I will have to put a new drive in that. Looked at EEPROM programmers on the net.

Also still weighing up stuff to sell at a later date, discovered a couple of Socket 7 motherboards that I don't need but have yet to test them.

HighTreason wrote:

Still floppy only for now; http://s26.postimg.org/y28w3y5h5/T32_0.jpg […]
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Still floppy only for now;

Completed Duke Nukem I Ep. 1 again with a nice sepia tone. Fiddled around with my 486DLC as it refused to load Windows. Swore at my K5 for corrupting the floppy disk I was putting Duke on - seems I will have to put a new drive in that. Looked at EEPROM programmers on the net.

Also still weighing up stuff to sell at a later date, discovered a couple of Socket 7 motherboards that I don't need but have yet to test them.

I didn't know they used to spell it Duke Nukum, interesting. I like how it has a proper keyboard. Many modern laptop keyboards are shit IMO.

I modified numerous QFP packaged IBM 5x86c chips on a Thinkpad interposer to run in standard socket 3 motherboards. Refer to attached. The end goal is 133-150 MHz operation.

Test out the backpack cd drive on my Zenith z286LP Plus.

Switched motherboard in my P-133 AT-system, and installed an 250 watt ATX 1.3 PSU in the system.
The "new" motherboard is one of those MVP3 based SS7 AT/ATX combo board.

What I can not understand or what actually surprised me, was that I do not need to disable any cache in order to run Dynablaster.
On the old F437 chipset based QDI-P5I437P4/FMB mobo, I needed to disable L1 and L2 cache to play Dynablaster.
On the Epox-MVP3-c with an K6-2-500, I could not even get Dynablaster to run.

Yet...
Witch the Epox board paired with the P-133, it will run 100%. Even Lotus-III will run with all cache enabled....
Why? What's going on? Sometimes I just do not understand computers at all.
The only guess, is that MVP3 + Pentium one's, are a great match for Dos gaming.
Another positive side-effect from this switch, is that HDD speed's are blazing compared to the old board.

This week I've been mostly addicted to my Compaq Deskpro 200MHZ MMX...
Played a bit of TES: Arena and NFS2. Also, configured the network so now it can access my files in the main PC... so I can listen to my music through Winamp 2 just like I did back then =).
I've also played arround with browsers. So far Netscape 4.something is the lightest, but also the one with the more trouble rendering modern sites... Internet Explorer 5.5 (didn't dare to install 6) is somewhat better, but more "freeze"-prone... Opera 10.10 renders well, but it is the slowest thing I've ever used... guess it needs a better processor? (I assume 256MB RAM isn't the issue... it doesn't seem to page things out while usin g it).

BTW, what did the people at MS that puts drivers on the OS disk smoke back then. The built-in Trio 64 driver was slow as hell, installing the Windows 95 driver from S3 seems to improve things significantly.

Working on a "new" DAW to replace the old Gateway P5-166, in the form of an upgraded Sony Vaio PCV-200. The system itself has a number of unique design features, yet is built around a standard (OEM-version) Intel AL440LX motherboard that, interestingly enough, also has the Yamaha YMF715-S and YMF721-S chipset combo. A customized OEM version of the ATi All-In-Wonder provides all of the built-in video and A/V connectivity.

I have a PSone that I'm thinking of leaving attached to this system, just for kicks (and because it looks pretty swell, frankly), and have therefore decided to dub this build the "Sony VaioStation," because I'm lame like that. 😎

Yamaha's DS2416 and AX44 pairing, along with an SW1000XG, will replace the functionality of the Event Echo Gina and Roland MPU-401AT cards used in the former system, while parallel-port connectivity will still be leveraged to interface with the MOTU MTP network.

Please pardon the crap photos.

The Compact Flash to IDE adapter arrived today and I quickly installed it into my 1995 Packard Bell 812CD. So now it has a 2GB solid state hard drive. 🤣

Also while I was in there I replaced the original Sound Card with a spare Sound Blaster 16 I had laying around and it picked it right up and used it. 😁 Windows 95 is a lot easier to use than I remember it being. 🤣

Posting to the forum using IE 5.5 in Win95c using a QFP IBM 5x86c at 133 MHz and simultaneously listing to a full-scale mp3 in Winamp v2.05. Pressing the pause button on Winamp is tough to resist.

feipoa wrote:

Posting to the forum using IE 5.5 in Win95c using a QFP IBM 5x86c at 133 MHz and simultaneously listing to a full-scale mp3 in Winamp v2.05. Pressing the pause button on Winamp is tough to resist.

That's what I like about this forum. It hasn't changed. It would be sadly ironic if it was the latest HTML with script here, script there, and unable to use on the older browsers. Please don't change, Vogons! 😊

Blurredman wrote:

feipoa wrote:

Posting to the forum using IE 5.5 in Win95c using a QFP IBM 5x86c at 133 MHz and simultaneously listing to a full-scale mp3 in Winamp v2.05. Pressing the pause button on Winamp is tough to resist.

That's what I like about this forum. It hasn't changed. It would be sadly ironic if it was the latest HTML with script here, script there, and unable to use on the older browsers. Please don't change, Vogons! 😊

I did notice about a 50% slow down with the new version of this website compared to the old one, however it is still functional on my 486s.

Over a year ago I got news about two IBM 320 Servers being given away for free 50km away from my location. I drove out and picked them up. Both servers worked perfectly and they were in good condition. When I get buy or get old computer stuff locally I always ask if they have more (pre-2000) and this guy said yes. He had a couple of Thinkpad's he was going to throw away. They were dusty and didn't look very good after 10 year in a garage, but I took them with me. No power adapters came with them so I just put them into storage. I bought the required power adapters from Ebay some time ago and finally I got around to test them. Picture is from when I got home with the servers and laptops:

The list of computers were as follows:

1x Thinkpad 750C
Intel 486SL 33mhz w/ FPU (no L2 cache)
20MB of RAM (max. upgraded)
1MB VGA
Sound (not SB compatible)
10" color screen 640x480
-No harddrive or caddy, no battery

1x Thinkpad 760CD
Intel Pentium 90
1MB VGA
Sound (SB compatible with TSR's)
40 MB RAM (max. upgraded)
12" color screen 800x600
-No harddrives or harddrive caddy 🙁
Working battery
Floppy drive (missing bezel)
- 89IOKL;: keys don't work

3x Thinkpad 760ED
Intel Pentium 133
2MB VGA
Sound (SB compatible with TSR's)
80MB RAM (max.upgraded)
12" color screen 1024x768
-No harddrives or harddrive caddy 🙁
One has External floppy drive glued to lid, all have 6x CD-ROM
Only one boots, the two others are not turning on.
Keyboard on the one that does boot worked for 10 min then stopped working....

2x Thinkpad 770
Intel Pentium 233MMX
2MB VGA
Sound (SB compatible with TSR's)
160MB RAM (max.upgraded)
13" color screen
-No harddrives or harddrive caddy 🙁
Floppy and non-working CD-ROM ultra drives
Only one works.

1x Thinkpad 770ED
Intel Pentium II 266mhz
Don't have much more info on this machine as it won't boot. The DVDrom has been placed into the working Thinkpad 770.

Generally I'm really glad the 750C worked! The backlight on the LCD didn't turn on at the first bootups, but I opened the lid and re-attached the cables and it fired up again 😀 Have some work cut out for me with the 760's as the keyboards on both machines that boots up is not working properly. All in all glad I have surplus machines of the same models for spare parts. Unfortunately it seems most of the machines have lived pretty harsh lives as they are scratched up on the outside, so to get one "perfect" machine on the 760 and 770 I'd have to transfer the best parts from the non-working machines which is quite amount of work. Plan is to buy an Ultra Dock 1, a new harddrive caddy for the machines and get something installed on it. Will probably go for CF card in the 750C. I have some older 2.5" IDE drives for the 760 and 770.

Ouch, just burned myself on a P3 600E coppermine.
Why was the fan not running.... 😵

Vetz: I have a 760EL w/zip drive (thats it) and the 770 w/cd drive and external floppy. The 760 has an ESS chip in it and runs games like Ultimate Doom and other games real well. The 770 is fantastic with a pretty good Crystal audio card in it, I love the aluminum body vs the earlier 760 plastic bodies.

ODwilly wrote:

Vetz: I have a 760EL w/zip drive (thats it) and the 770 w/cd drive and external floppy. The 760 has an ESS chip in it and runs games like Ultimate Doom and other games real well. The 770 is fantastic with a pretty good Crystal audio card in it, I love the aluminum body vs the earlier 760 plastic bodies.

Nice 😀 One thing that I didn't like about the 760 and 770 is that the LCD screens doesnt scale with 320x200 resolutions. It's only scaled to 640x480 so it's pretty small on the screen. The 750C scales to the entire screen.

Cloudschatze wrote:

Working on a "new" DAW to replace the old Gateway P5-166, in the form of an upgraded Sony Vaio PCV-200. The system itself has a number of unique design features, yet is built around a standard (OEM-version) Intel AL440LX motherboard that, interestingly enough, also has the Yamaha YMF715-S and YMF721-S chipset combo. A customized OEM version of the ATi All-In-Wonder provides all of the built-in video and A/V connectivity.

I have a PSone that I'm thinking of leaving attached to this system, just for kicks (and because it looks pretty swell, frankly), and have therefore decided to dub this build the "Sony VaioStation," because I'm lame like that. 😎

Yamaha's DS2416 and AX44 pairing, along with an SW1000XG, will replace the functionality of the Event Echo Gina and Roland MPU-401AT cards used in the former system, while parallel-port connectivity will still be leveraged to interface with the MOTU MTP network.

Whoa. Can't say I'm very fond of the OEM case but all that Yamaha gear makes it a very impressive system.

Which reminds me, I have yet to try those AL440LX boards. IIRC I have two of them with the 715+721 chips (Dell OEM).